Nineteenth-Century Quartet: Desire, Commodity, and Imperial Polity

The editors are grateful for the assistance of Jack Farrell, Kurt Heinzelman, Neville Hoad, Alan Liu, Carol MacKay, Walter Reed, and Helena Woodard.

In our first essay, Barbara Judson claims that Byron's Sardanapalus reorients the typically conservative genre of historical drama by representing post-Waterloo British imperialism not as dispassionate sublimation of virile English masculinity but debauched indulgence. Polymorphic perversity, it would seem, informs the political no less than the private sphere. Daniel O'Quinn formulates a question broadly relevant to victims of the "psychopathology" attendant on such imperial indulgence, whether one has surrendered agency to opium or been subjected to commodity exchange in the slave trade, victimizations narrated by Thomas De Quincey and Olaudah Equiano, respectively: "how does one recover from the experience of thingness or non-humanity?" Fear of a more general loss of personhood and differentiating human relation is for Daniela Garofalo the ground of a gendered sexuality of value in Thomas Carlyle's devotion to past heroes. In industrialized, capitalist society, cultic reverence for what has been lost—a mystery religion centered on dead leaders—can regenerate an "effeminate" society and erotically animate a social order otherwise reducible to the cash nexus. Finally, in Courtney C. Berger's analysis, Trollope's The Prime Minister, like the Palliser novels generally, concerns not the Victorian mundane but the subtle and, in Trollope's distinctive view, dangerous subjection of political processes to commercial mechanisms and "a freestanding and self-sufficient sociality." For Trollope at least, a political order that rests on profit and popularity effaces difference and undercuts identity and alliance.